Discussion on:

Fire suppression for the server room

We are removing the water sprinklers from our server room and putting in an equipment friendly fire suppression system. Read the post:

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/techofalltrades/?p=149

Have you heard of aerosol-based fire protection? In particular, has anyone had any experience with the company I referenced in the article?

In our case we use FM-200.
You can read about it in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-200
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070513011235AA4aLPW

My understanding is that halon is an ozone depleting gas and therefore shouldn't be used for new installations and in the UK all such systems shuold have been decmissioned therefore we use FM200 (possibly other trade names inogen or some such).

http://www.fike.com/ecaro_products.html

It is supposedly %100 safe for humans. On the bad side the explosive charge in the head coupled with the escaping gasses will blow the drop ceiling tiles out of the roof (no choice about those being in there, I hate them) and will blow around any loose debris/paper/light items in the room. Not an enviroment I care to be in! I thought the explosive charge bit was pretty cool. I didn't realize it but almost all gas based systems use a small blasting cap in the dispersal head to realease the product. I couldn't convince the installer to let me have a few of those to experiment with.

We 've had a sales person demonstrating that the product made by 3M (that looks like water) is harmless for equipment by droping his cell-phone in the bottle and letting me call it. It just kept working and after he took it back out of it, the fluid drip out of the cell phone. it still worked.

Better back up that server.

I currently work as a National IT manager for a Fire Protection Company, we recommend FM200 the link at Wikipedia mentioned earlier is a good resource.

My company installs fire suppression systems for server rooms or server closets right on the rack or mainframe We use clean agents such as FM200 or 3M Novec 1230. You can use our low-pressure switch to send a signal to your existing fire panel or to shut off power, etc. I have pictures at my blog: http://firetraceviking.wordpress.com/ These systems are self-contained, require no power, and are portable with the rack or mainframe if you need to move it. Let me know what you think.

I just ran into this article.

Anyway, to add:

The people I work with seem to think that the fire extinguisher down the hall is adequate protection.....WOW.